Roy Lee is the kind of alumnus that the University of Toronto likes to brag about. Not only is he a graduate of their law program and former Yale student; he’s also responsible for one of the most collegiate sounds on campus: the Soldiers’ Tower carillon bells. Even if you’ve never heard of the carillon, […]

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Photo by Jeffrey Bossin

Roy Lee is the kind of alumnus that the University of Toronto likes to brag about. Not only is he a graduate of their law program and former Yale student; he’s also responsible for one of the most collegiate sounds on campus: the Soldiers’ Tower carillon bells.

Even if you’ve never heard of the carillon, we’d bet that you’ve heard it. Often featured at weddings and graduation ceremonies, the carillon is a massive instrument containing at least 23 bronze bells connected to batons and pedals. Striking a baton at a console located just below the bell chamber rings the bell up in the tower, and striking more than one at a time produces a chord. In addition to being a Guild of Carillonneurs–certified performer, Lee, 35, has also played the piano, organ, French horn and bass guitar. (He’s also a litigator for the Department of Justice, just in case you want an even higher standard to hold your kids to.) Lee has been playing the carillon at U of T since 2001, and he’s been teaching the instrument since 2004. Despite its olden-days feel, the carillon seems to have a bright future.

Our interview with Lee―about performing Disney’s Frozen, the surprising similarities between the carillon and the courtroom, and being part of a musical tradition―is below.

Torontoist: For those people who have never heard of the carillon, how would you describe it?

Roy Lee: The carillon is a musical instrument of tuned bells, usually hung in a tower. The carillonneur plays from a keyboard that looks a bit like an organ, with batons played with fists and pedals played with feet. The bells themselves don’t move. There is a clapper inside each bell that is controlled by the batons and pedals, and when the clapper strikes the inside lip of the bell, the sound is made. It is a completely mechanical instrument, so the carillonneur can play expressively and control exactly how softly or loudly the bells will ring by striking the batons and pedals with less or more force. The University of Toronto’s Soldiers’ Tower Carillon has 51 bells, ranging in weight from four tons to 23 pounds. A broad range of music is possible on the carillon, from Baroque to contemporary, from folk songs to music more suitable for Remembrance Day. I played “Let It Go” the other day because the city was frozen!

The carillon is kind of a rare instrument; there are only about a dozen in Canada. How did you get started? What made you decide to pursue it?

Growing up, I played organ and piano, so I have a strong keyboard background. At Yale, where I did my undergrad, a student guild has been responsible for playing the carillon there since 1949. New members were recruited every fall, so I signed up for lessons during first year and have been playing ever since. When I came to U of T for law school, I was fortunate to come to a place with a carillon. I had my credentials, having just obtained my advanced carillonneur certificate from the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America, so they let me play.

There are only 11 carillons in Canada, but we have three right here in Toronto. Aside from the war memorial carillon at U of T, which was installed the same year as the Peace Tower Carillon in Ottawa, there is a carillon at the Metropolitan United Church on Queen Street. A recital is performed there before Sunday service each week, and I play there occasionally when the church’s carillonneur is away. The third, and newest Toronto carillon is at the Ex, right by the bandshell. Unfortunately it is no longer played regularly, although my students and I do go there about once a year to play for the birds. There are other smaller bell instruments, mainly at churches, but to be considered a carillon an instrument must have at least 23 bells.

Unlike a guitar or a piano, when you practice the carillon, the whole neighbourhood can hear you. How do you cope with making mistakes and learning in the public eye?

Our instrument is unique in that way. We have a practice console that looks like the carillon keyboard, but just rings little glockenspiel bars. We can learn the location of notes on the practice keyboard, but the weight of the key feels totally different, so playing a new piece for the first time on the carillon will still be a nervous experience. We may have to be ready to improvise a little bit, to simplify things when we feel we are about to lose control, and to recover from mistakes quickly and keep going. Eventually, we’re ready to perform the piece with confidence at our formal recitals in spring and summer, at graduation time, and at our annual Remembrance Day ceremony.

How does your law practice and your carillon practice intertwine? How does trying to have a work-life balance of a lawyer and a musician affect your time?

At law school, they paired the first years with alumni mentors, and I remember mine told me that keeping up with my music might eventually help me become a better litigator. You learn preparing for a recital that all that work before the big day pays off, and the same can be said about preparing for court. Also, something unexpected always happens during a performance, and you learn to stay calm and make the best of it. During my Canada Day recital one year, the cannon a block away at Queen’s Park went off while I was playing…and it boomed 20 more times for several minutes! I’ve not had to deal with cannon fire in the courtroom yet, but witnesses or judges saying something unexpected can be equally terrifying. I enjoy being both a lawyer and a musician, so I make it work. Scheduling can get pretty hectic, but fortunately the subway connects me from home to the tower to work, and some days back to the tower before home.

You also teach the carillon now. What made you decide to take on students? How has becoming a teacher shaped your relationship with the instrument?

U of T is the only university in Canada with a carillon on campus, so I felt it was important to continue growing the carillon art by taking on students. It also helps to have several people capable of performing so that the carillon can be played regularly. Soldiers’ Tower, including the carillon, was a gift from the alumni after World War I to be the university’s war memorial, and it was intended to be a tower with bells that would for all time be an audible and daily reminder of the 628 members of the university who lost their lives during the Great War. Whenever one of us plays the carillon and a passerby stops at the base of the memorial to listen, we help the university fulfill the wishes of the alumni-donors.

What’s the best part of this job?

Earlier you mentioned the public nature of our instrument. It is truly awesome to have the power to bring people together in times of celebration and commemoration, and to help foster this shared experience of the university community: to walk around campus and hear this beautiful music from the sky.

One of the neatest experiences is when I finish playing and come out of the tower, and I pass by someone humming the tune that I was just playing. To know that I have just brought joy to someone’s day definitely makes climbing all those steps worthwhile.

“When you write about food, those are your best stories.” For Amy Rosen, hearing those words from her editors changed her life. About 12 years ago, she switched from focusing on lifestyle trends to writing just about food. Already a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu school in Ottawa, and armed with a graduate degree in […]

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Photo courtesy of Amy Rosen.

“When you write about food, those are your best stories.” For Amy Rosen, hearing those words from her editors changed her life. About 12 years ago, she switched from focusing on lifestyle trends to writing just about food. Already a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu school in Ottawa, and armed with a graduate degree in journalism from the University of King’s College in Halifax, Rosen thought focusing on food would make her writing outlets disappear. She was wrong. In her first year, she doubled her income, and now she contributes to enRoute magazine, the LCBO’s Food & Drink magazine, the National Post, and more.

Her most recent project is 2014’s Toronto Cooks, a love letter to Toronto’s growing culinary scene. It showcases 48 chefs, including local legends like Dufflet Rosenberg and undeniable taste-makers like Parts & Labour’s Matty Matheson. Their collection of 100 recipes runs the gamut from donuts to pad thai, and brawny burgers to delicate ceviche. “I wanted recipes that people can execute, and that they will execute,” Rosen said. “My biggest passion is getting people to cook at home.”

Our interview with Rosen—about the value of travel, the impossibility of scheduling a five-day photo shoot, and reflecting Toronto’s diversity in a cookbook—is below.

Torontoist: What prompted the creation of the Toronto Cooks cookbook?

Amy Rosen: I had a new publisher out west, and they had done Vancouver Cooks a decade ago, and he thought the same could work in Toronto. But Vancouver Cooks, which I owned, was the opposite of the book I would want to do. It sold really well, but it was sort of old-fashioned. It was everyone in their starched whites, food plated high, and nothing achievable at home. Each recipe was four pages long. I said, “Now is Toronto’s time, and thanks for coming to me, but I’ll do this if we make it the opposite of what Vancouver Cooks was.” Let it be known that this is what the Toronto food scene is today. I wanted chefs in their street clothes. I knew there would be burgers. I wanted it to be a well-used, dog-eared, stained cookbook. I wanted people to make the recipes that they eat at their favourite restaurants at home. The publisher said yes to everything, and it really was the best-case scenario.

What was it like trying to wrangle 50 chefs, their recipes, and photo shoots, all on a deadline?

My first choice of photographer was Ryan [Szulc], and he agreed to it if we could shoot everyone in five days. I was like, “Impossible.” This is how it worked out: for five days, every 45 minutes a new chef would show up with their components ready. They would finish cooking their dishes on-site. The food prop stylist would set up. They would plate their own dishes. There was a five-minute portrait. And then the next chef would come through the door. It was every 45 minutes for five days straight. They hired someone else to schedule it. I would do everything else for this book, but I would not schedule that. There were some problems: one guy showed up without his food, but he had a restaurant right around the corner, so he just went there, grabbed the components, and it worked out.

For the recipes, I asked for the two recipes that they thought represented their restaurant best, that they thought people could achieve at home. No fancy equipment, but if you had to go to a specialty store for certain ingredients, that was fine. I asked them to test the recipes at home, using at-home measurements, in their own kitchen. I don’t want their sous-chefs doing this. I said, “Get a pen, write it out.” It worked out to a pretty even split between appetizers, main courses, and desserts, which made me so happy. What I did have to do so much work on, and I should have known this because I had a food column in the Post for years, was getting the recipes out of them. I was on really tight deadlines. The publisher basically asked me for the recipes two weeks before Christmas, and I was lucky if I got them within two months.

The book showcases young chefs and established chefs, there are men and women, and people of colour. Was that diversity intentional?

One hundred per cent intentional. I was trying for more diversity, and some people said no, or didn’t get back to me, or it wasn’t in their culture, or whatever. I kind of had to lower my expectations and realize it wasn’t going to be quite the mix I wanted. The feedback has been universally positive, but one woman got in touch and said, “Too bad it’s 99 per cent male chefs.” I was taken aback, because it was my number-one priority to get female representation in the book. I actually counted, and it’s not a huge majority, but it is above the demographic. The other thing is, [the women are] almost all pastry chefs. But I looked at the restaurants and asked myself which ones had female chefs, and which ones were my favourites. I was going east, west, north, south, all different ethnicities of food, and that was definitely on purpose. I don’t think it 100 per cent reflects what Toronto is today, but I’m happy enough.

Over the last 10 or so years, fine dining has changed to include more fusion, local, and street-inspired influences. Do you think Toronto has the potential to be a trend-driver in these areas?

Totally. It’s not that [David] Chang and [Daniel] Boulud are coming here, which are completely just business propositions. We’re creating our own type of food here, and it’s delicious. You can’t get away with expensive shit in Toronto because it’s one of the places that lasts for three months. We don’t have the population to support crap or frivolity. We don’t care about labels as much, and in the past 10 years, we’ve been really lucky with places like Bar Isabel that make really unique, delicious food. Everything’s homemade, it’s very thoughtful. It’s based on travel—it’s not fusion, but people go to France and Spain and Italy. They make authentic food, mixing with local ingredients and the local palate.

What was your favourite part of creating this cookbook?

Definitely the photo shoot, and watching how the chefs move. They loved the portrait sessions, and the photographer said it was one his best experiences as well. They were just so happy to come together, they were high-fiving the next chef as they came through the door, they all knew each other. It was was there that I realized that this is a real community, and I hadn’t realized it existed before.

“The biggest trick to throwing an axe is just to follow through. Grip is important, your stance is important, but I’d equate it to a tennis serve.” As the owner of BATL Alternative Sports, Matt Wilson would know. He’s taken axe-throwing from a backyard hobby and a local phenomenon to a rapidly expanding company that […]

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“The biggest trick to throwing an axe is just to follow through. Grip is important, your stance is important, but I’d equate it to a tennis serve.” As the owner of BATL Alternative Sports, Matt Wilson would know. He’s taken axe-throwing from a backyard hobby and a local phenomenon to a rapidly expanding company that aims to have 35 locations across North America by 2017.

BATL currently sees about 2,000 to 3,000 people through private events each month in its two Toronto locations, and will be adding a third in February, in North York. It also operates from a location in Pickering—and Wilson now has his eye on Kitchener-Waterloo, Ottawa, and Calgary. It’s come a long way since the league’s beginnings in 2006, when Wilson and a handful of friends got together in his backyard for a little cottage-inspired mayhem.

Our interview with Wilson—about BATL’s underground beginnings, the challenges of insurance, and playing nice with police officers—is below.

Torontoist: How did the Backyard Axe-Throwing League get started? How did you take it from a hobby to a business?

Matt Wilson: BATL started at a drunk trip at a cottage in October of 2006, with two good buddies, Charles Ketchebaw and Neshon Abadjian. They’re both pretty unique dudes, and Neshon taught me how to throw an axe that weekend. I came back to my apartment in Little Italy, and I was going on about it to my roommate. When I tried to relay how satisfying it was to him, he kind of shrugged it off. I was like, “You don’t understand! I’m going to make you understand!” There was a bunch of scrap wood outside from a neighbour’s renovations, so we just grabbed that and duct-taped it together and made this very scrappy target. We bought whatever axe we could find, and started throwing it. By the end of the weekend, we were kind of getting the hang of it, and started thinking of friends we thought would like doing it. Eventually, we had a list of about 20 people, and I was like, “Why don’t I just call them and see about starting a league?” So we cleaned up the backyard and called some buddies and launched our first 12-person league.

When it became a business, it became one out of necessity. We only had two targets in the backyard, and it slowly grew to the maximum of 16 people, but we started getting a following of people who were coming out to watch. We put up two more targets, and as soon as we said we would be able to double our roster, it was full within hours. We did two seasons like that, and we still had 20 or 30 different people showing up every week. After we put up a Facebook post and asked anyone who was interested to check it out, we had 60 people show up, and signed up 30 on the spot. That became our Monday night league. When we started getting regular checks from the police, we knew we had to move it indoors. The cops were super cool about it, and they’d stick around and watch. By that point, we had floodlights shining down on the house, and everything was very obviously organized, but we still took it as a sign to move it indoors.

Why axes? Why not bocce ball, or lawn darts?

It’s just a situation of circumstance. My friend had an axe with him at the cottage when it was raining and there was nothing to do, so away we went. I’ve always been a bar gamesman: I love pool, ping-pong, darts, and all that stuff. Axes were just the next level of satisfaction, just having something spin in the air. It looks and feels like it should be really hard to do, and then you do it. We get that reaction from tons of new people and they’re like, “I’m really clumsy and I don’t think I can do this,” and within minutes, they’re hitting a couple and they freak out. This business is based on that positive attitude. All of our staff are super encouraging, and each person finds it in their own stride.

What’s your insurance like?

[Laughs] Yeah, it’s pretty extreme. Insurance was a huge challenge. We tried to get it in the backyard, and when I started shopping around, the quotes were insane. Like $25,000 a month, and I needed to have six EMS staff on-site all the time. They just didn’t understand what we were doing at all. My friend Charles Ketchebaw’s brother-in-law was an insurance broker, and Charles has been supportive throughout. When I put it out there that I was struggling, they helped us package it properly for the insurance companies. That changed the game. The nice thing about the investors jumping on board is that they had better contacts that could protect it properly. It’s a huge cost for us, but it’s a part of the business model.

I’ve always said that people need to come down and take a look. I think everyone’s first reaction is “What? Are you crazy?” And then we say that they can bring their own beers, and they just think we’re nuts, but it’s organized. There are designated areas for throwing and for hanging out. There is one staff for every two people throwing, and that’s not an accident, it’s to be sure we’re always safe. Our injury record is phenomenal. We have had 60,000 people through this place, and we haven’t had a serious injury. Nothing from our events, who are the people who have never thrown before. We’re adamant about intoxication, and if you’ve had too much, you’re not allowed to throw. We treat it like a gentlemen’s club.

You’ve mentioned a gentlemen’s club, and the league’s oath talks about “primal man.” Do you think axe-throwing is a particularly masculine thing to do?

No, I don’t. The only reason I said gentlemen’s club is that I don’t know of another phrase to explain that feeling. It’s like a speakeasy, in a way. You know where it is, you come in, and you’re allowed to do something that you’re not allowed to do in very many places. There’s a certain unspoken code of conduct. You need to behave in a certain way in order to be allowed to stay. When we first started, we were a lot of dudes, and breaking females into the league took a while. But our very first league had a woman, and she stuck around for the next one. As we expanded, the female response has been huge. Our events are about half women, and our leagues are about a third female. We’re big on equality that way. There are no handicaps, we don’t separate the genders in competition, and everyone does well.

What drives people to try throwing axes? And why do they keep coming back?

The underground nature of it is what helped us get started, for sure. It was like Fight Club in the backyard days. We kept that going in the west end location, because we had no signage and no way to find us unless you knew where it was. That became part of the charm, I think. We haven’t ever spent any money on advertising, and it’s all just been word of mouth. People leave here raving about what they’ve experienced, and they talk about it for days or weeks. People get curious about that. Then the experience here is super inclusive and positive. Every time I’m here, there’s an eruption of screams and it’s always someone’s, like, tiny mother who just hit a bulls-eye and the place is losing their minds. People are literally jumping up and down and smacking the wall at that point, and that stuff happens every day. At the end of each event, we take two photos. One is just a regular photo, but in the other one, we get everyone to flip us the bird and tell us to go fuck ourselves. We’re a super-friendly group that can still be a little crass. People totally embrace that. If I can put a little bit of profanity in people’s lives, I’m good with that.

CORRECTION: January 9, 2015, 12:50 PM This post originally spelled the names of Charles Ketchebaw and Neshon Abadjian incorrectly. We regret the error.

Yvonne Bambrick wears many hats. She’s a founding member of Pedestrian Sundays, the popular series of street closure events in Kensington Market that acts as a showcase for area businesses, musicians, and local colour. In 2008, she helped establish the Toronto Cyclists Union (now Cycle Toronto), an advocacy group that seeks to make bikes an […]

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Yvonne Bambrick wears many hats. She’s a founding member of Pedestrian Sundays, the popular series of street closure events in Kensington Market that acts as a showcase for area businesses, musicians, and local colour. In 2008, she helped establish the Toronto Cyclists Union (now Cycle Toronto), an advocacy group that seeks to make bikes an integral part of Toronto’s transportation and public health strategies. She’s also the executive director of Forest Hill Village BIA, a corporate photographer, and the author of the upcoming book from ECW Press The Urban Cycling Survival Guide. Since 2010, she’s billed herself as an “urban cycling consultant,” a role that involves making media and panel appearances, and teaching at the Maximum City summer program.

Bambrick, 38, says bikes suit her Toronto lifestyle perfectly: “cars are a great tool, but in a getting-around-the-city context, for those trips that are up to five kilometres, bikes are a great option,” she explained recently at Handlebar, a bar in Kensington Market. “I’m always living in bike land.”

Our interview with Bambrick—about transit, growing up as a cyclist, and the importance of a reflective vest in winter—is below.

Torontoist: How did you make the switch from being someone who rides a bike in Toronto to being an urban cycling advocate?

Yvonne Bambrick: I grew up on a bike in the city. My dad had me on the back of his bike in a kid’s seat as a baby, so it was a natural rhythm for me. I started riding from East York to my high school downtown, and to my summer job teaching sailing at the waterfront. When I lived in Montreal, I was a driver, which is odd because I was such a bike person before. But I taught downhill skiing and I catered all the mid-sized concert venues, and you can’t do either of those without a car. When I moved to Australia, I sold the car and used the money to pay for part of my graduate studies, and I got back on a bike. I got used to riding year-round there, and I decided to continue that when I moved back to Canada. I mean, I’ve been a ski instructor, so I can handle the weather. Riding year-round is my winter sport.

Pedestrian Sundays were formed in large part out of the ideas that came out of Streets Are for People, and we were sort of a friendly bike gang that was doing protest stuff. One day [Dave] Meslin called us together and said, “Hey, I have this idea. What do you think?” So as I had with the Pedestrian Sundays and the street closures, I put my hand up to help with the Bike Union. When we had to collectively decide on an executive team to move that project forward, I volunteered as the communications person. We were a four-person executive for the first year, and I was then hired as the Executive Director. I had done a lot of work in front of the camera and on radio in a spokesperson role. I was much more interested in the pro-bike rather than anti-car aspect. The stuff I didn’t already know, I learned on the go. When you’re immersed in a subject matter, you’re constantly engaged with city staff and activists and advocates and other organizations outside of the city.

How does Toronto stack up against other cities when it comes to building and supporting cycling infrastructure?

Toronto started out strong. There was this great bike plan in 2001 and it set out some really excellent goals, but it kind of fell flat fairly quickly. That was another reason the Bike Union was formed. We needed someone building the political will and helping to push this stuff through. Toronto did alright for a time, but this is also something that’s in constant flux. Cities across North America are adapting, and the best-case scenario for infrastructure has continued to change as new guidelines are developed and made available to cities. Things take time at the municipal and provincial level. Montreal is kicking our ass. New York? Kicking our ass. But I think we’re getting there slowly. The Richmond-Adelaide pieces are great, but they’re too short, and there’s still a lack of compliance on the part of some motorists. You couldn’t be more obviously in the wrong spot when you pull over into a separated bike lane.

The last four years under Ford were particularly divisive. All the suburban vs. urban, car vs. bike stuff, you could feel it on the streets. I think we’ve got some fixing to do around that. But bike lanes aren’t just the pet projects of downtown bike riders. They add predictability and help make the roads work better. Everybody gets along better, there are fewer collisions, and you don’t have to be as afraid, as a driver, that you might hit somebody, or that you might be hit as a rider. One thing that we’re really failing on is the public education piece. That was one of the “spokes” of the bike plan, and it’s been chronically underfunded or ignored. It’s essential, not just in explaining how things work and how to engage with them as a cyclist or a driver, but also in building public support and understanding of the collective benefits.

There’s the need to move beyond completing the network downtown, both to connect the core to our suburban quadrants, and to allow people within suburban areas to move around their own neighbourhoods. If you want to get to the grocery store and you have a long, horrible walk through an inhospitable space, that’s not great. A lot of people don’t have access to cars, and the transit system isn’t great. We’ve really got to start looking at a city-wide network, not just those missing pieces in the core.

You’ve got a book coming out; tell us a little bit about that, and how it came about.

It’s called The Urban Cycling Survival Guide, and it’s my attempt to help fill the gap in bike education. In September 2012, I read yet another article about whether or not cyclists should be licensed. It comes up just about every year, often after some very unusual collision has occurred. I don’t think licensing stops you from making poor decisions. Knowing what the right thing to do in any given scenario is more important. I got tired of hearing myself regularly reference this gap in cycling education and I thought, Hmm. Maybe I should do something about that. I’m aiming the book at new and would-be riders, but there’s a lot of stuff in there for people who have been riding for a while. There are a ton of people out there who can see themselves in the people riding past them—it’s not just dudes in spandex, and it hasn’t been for a while now—but they’re still nervous about where to start.

I talk about reasons why riding a bike is a great transportation option, and how to get started by using bike-shares, and buying a used bike or what to expect when you go into a bike shop. Things like what a tune-up is, and all the basics for the vehicle itself. I go through the rules of the road, and the unwritten rules as well: knowing full well that some riders will just go straight through a stop sign, I talk about how to do that safely. It sounds strange, but knowing that it’s going to happen anyway, here’s how to do it less badly. I’ve got a section on riding for all ages, so how to ride with your kids and the various options for kids to ride either on or alongside your bike. Also riding as a senior, and how to ride with your dog! [laughs] The final chapter is about the role of advocacy in cities across North America. We’ve gotten as far as we have with bike infrastructure because people have been fighting really hard to make it happen.

Do you have any tips for someone who’s considering riding in winter for the first time?

Absolutely! Lights for sure, and if you have a black coat, definitely look into one of those reflective vests or sashes. Anything you can do to increase your visibility at night, even with lights on your bike, is definitely important. It doesn’t take much to affect a driver’s ability to see through fogged or frosty windshields. You want to underdress a little, and start a little chilly. Once your engine gets going, you heat up pretty quickly. One thing I love is to wear thin inner gloves under warm outer mittens. This helps with wind while you’re riding, and then when you get to where you’re going, you can lock up your bike and deal with your lights without losing all your heat. Cold air in the lungs can be tough, especially if you’re asthmatic or breathing heavily, so pace yourself and cover your mouth with a scarf. When it snows, get some practice before going out onto the roads. Head onto a laneway or a side street and practice stopping on the snow, turning, getting on and off your bike, and practice braking slowly. I always like to test the roadway with my foot first, especially if it’s been wet and then the temperature has dropped, just in case it’s slick or slippery. Generally, just slow down, be careful, be well-lit and visible, and dress to the conditions.

What’s the best part of being involved in Toronto’s cycling scene?

Bikes are cool! They’re so amazing, and important to the planet, and for our physical health. They’re so damn practical. You save money, you save time. They’re little time machines. I can’t think of anything that’s bad about bikes, except for the fact that sometimes we get doored or fall down, but life is life and things can happen no matter what mode you’re on. Everybody who is engaged with bikes as something that’s important to improve the city are good, good people. They see that bigger picture, and understand the importance of a bike in the urban context. Bikes are part of the urban DNA.

Three times a week from late September until early June, Nina Draganic watches as audiences file into the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre at the Four Seasons Centre. People ranging in age from infanthood to “as old as it gets” settle into the step-like seating that overlooks the intersection of Queen and University and wait for Draganic […]

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Photo by H. Lewis, courtesy of the Canadian Opera Company

Three times a week from late September until early June, Nina Draganic watches as audiences file into the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre at the Four Seasons Centre. People ranging in age from infanthood to “as old as it gets” settle into the step-like seating that overlooks the intersection of Queen and University and wait for Draganic to introduce a new musical performance—which might involve an indie dance troupe, a Balinese gamelan, or a classical opera singer. Draganic, as the Free Concert Series programmer for the Canadian Opera Company, has introduced hundreds of concerts since the series began in 2006, but she still gets excited by the fact that “anybody who wants to can come to these concerts.” They are, as the title says, totally free.

Draganic, 50, has been in the role since the inception of the series in 2005. She worked closely with Richard Bradshaw as his executive assistant in the five years leading up the opening of the opera house; before that, she was the general manager of Canadian Children’s Opera Company and the administrator at the Canadian Opera Volunteer Committee. Now, she says, “I’m a department of one,” but her passion for the job is obvious. “I didn’t set out saying that I wanted to work at the Canadian Opera Company or that I wanted to program a concert series. I pursued the things that I love, and they all came together very beautifully in the field of opera and then in this completely unique concert series portfolio.”

She was born in Zagreb, Croatia (at the time, Yugoslavia), and came to Canada at the age of five. “I grew up here and did all the usual things that children of Eastern European immigrants do: piano lessons, dance classes, all that stuff.” This led to a double major in piano and music history from Queen’s University, where she enrolled at the age of 16—and she originally had aspirations to become a concert pianist. (She also played trumpet and an instrument called the sackbut.) When she sustained a fairly serious hand injury toward the end of her degree, she realized some of the vulnerabilities professional musicians face: “I was playing a work by Bartok that involved a lot of heavy playing and a particular technical issue”—here she pounds her pinky finger heavily on the table—”and as a result of it, I had to take time off.” She then spent time in Europe studying languages (she speaks seven) and soaking up musical history. She earned a Masters in Slavic languages and literature from the Freie Universität Berlin and also worked at the Berlin Film Festival as a translator and program coordinator for the festival’s international section.

Our interview with Draganic—about artistic opportunities, transcendent moments, and keeping many balls in the air at the same time—is below.

Torontoist: How did the free concert series get started?

Nina Draganic: I was certainly in the right place at the right time. Richard Bradshaw was the kind of person who loved to talk, and he shared his dreams and aspirations with the people he worked most closely with—and I was one of those. He was sitting in his office one day, dreaming in Technicolour about what we could do with this new building, and he mentioned the possibility of some kind of concert series to animate the space, to bring people in, and to fulfill a variety of mandates. I think my eyes lit up like hundred-watt lightbulbs. He immediately recognized that it was a perfect fit for me, and basically I was given carte blanche to set it up.

The idea was very much to have as diverse as possible a programming that really reflected our city: who we are as Torontonians and who we are as Canadians. And reflect that diversity in our audiences, as well, and make everybody in Toronto, and everybody visiting Toronto, feel welcome in our building. Of course, we’d also be very happy if the people who are coming into our building take an interest in what we’re doing, so there are a lot of different mandates.

The artists in the series range from emerging artists who are often still students—the brightest young students, but not yet professionals—to the stars of the international opera stage and touring artists of a real international calibre. It’s really a fantastic opportunity for younger artists to have some profile and be on the same playbill as some of their greatest heroes. The artists are so grateful for the opportunity to have something like this, where they can try new things and different collaborations. Audiences are also very grateful when you give them this rich and high-quality programming for free. They can try things that they might be a little bit apprehensive about, and it’s a great way to open doors for people. But the artists are equally appreciative because they can try things, and there just isn’t the same kind of pressure as in other performance situations. There’s a tremendous amount of goodwill.

How do you plot out a season? There are so many different factors—touring artists, promotion, planning for a wide range of performers—not to mention the fact that you have to organize it all up to a year in advance.

I always have my dream document of all the things I want to do. In the first seasons, before anybody knew what it was, I had to reach out and convince people that they would want to be part of it. Now, I’m literally inundated with proposals. You can’t imagine the number of people who want a piece of this, and there are a limited number of slots, there’s a limited budget, and there’s only so much I can do. It’s a great problem to have. I could put together five series each season, but that’s not what a programmer does. You want to balance emerging and established artists, you want to have a good mix, and you want to have different themes running through it. I quickly realized that you can’t overproduce things. There’s a place where it comes together and you go, “Yeah, that’s it.” But you have to start with your vision, and then deal with the reality of a million logistical things.

It’s a little bit like cooking, I guess. You can have a recipe and say that it’s exactly what you’re going to do. Or you can look in your fridge, see what you’ve got, and creatively put something together that makes use of those ingredients. It’s a combination of both approaches. It’s a long process that goes in many layers, and the juggling act is phenomenal. We’re dealing with the scheduling of the building, the schedule of the opera company and the ballet and third-party rentals, and then we’re dealing with the schedule of about five hundred artists. It does involve some very good systems and organizational systems. There are always balls in the air, and hundreds of people that you’re dealing with. Programming is one thing, and then you’re also running the concerts at the same time. It’s a lot of people in your orbit. It can feel overwhelming at times, but it’s so exciting.

Most of the series is musical, but you present dance as well. How does including dancers in the series change the programming?

We’re so blessed in Toronto that we have so many different and colourful varieties of dance. We have companies like Ballet Jorgen, who are wonderful and offer so much variety in their performances, and other groups that focus on a particular ethnic tradition that they bring a more contemporary sensibility to; again, you’re trying to get a balance.

From a technical standpoint, the space does not have a sprung floor. We do have a surface that we can put down that offers some padding and protection, but any classical companies who dance on pointe and have impact stuff have to modify their programming for the space. So it does tend to be heavy on the contemporary dance, which tends to be less high-impact. I mean, dancers just love that space. It’s so open! Peggy Baker said that whatever we put in there is just so perfectly framed. They’re used to dancing in a dark space, in a spotlight where they don’t see the audience. You can almost hide in that spotlight. Here, you’re so much more connected. We often do previews of works in progress, so they might be preparing to do a bigger production of something, but they’ll do it in our space with minimal production values and without all the trappings. It’s more of a naked performance, and it really keeps them honest about where they are in their process and gives the audience a very different look at a piece that’s evolving.

But seriously, though. How is all of this free?

It was part of Richard Bradshaw’s original vision that no matter what, these performances should always be free. It’s part of the title of series! [Laughs] It’s very much about accessibility and about eliminating any barriers so that anyone who wants to can attend these concerts. We’ve made that a priority.

We had a very generous donor who established an endowment specifically to fund the free concert series, and there are always sponsors and donors to help out with the programming. It’s also a very important platform for our younger artists in the Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio. We showcase members of our orchestra, and many singers who are on the main stage perform there. There are many collaborations and co-presentations and sponsorships, so the artists are paid, but not always by the COC. For example, I’m bringing in an Icelandic pianist, and the consulate of Iceland is paying his fee and his travel costs, and I do everything else. You need to be creative when you’re coming up with these types of arrangements. We might have a Russian singer who’s performing in an Italian opera on the main stage, and who never gets to sing Russian repertoire, or folk songs, or whatever it is. We get to see another side of them, and it’s a real enhancement on many levels. We work with young instrumentalists, many of whom end up playing in our orchestra or being connected to our company. I don’t know what will happen down the road, but the idea is that it should always be totally free and accessible.

It’s particularly sweet, as a programmer, to not be driven by the bottom line of ticket sales. If you have to meet your ticket sale quotas, and you’re programming very adventurously, and audiences are forking over forty or fifty or one hundred dollars, you might have a hard time selling something that is absolutely worth doing. Interestingly, the concerts are always full, whether I’m doing some really out-there contemporary thing or something really popular. It is very wonderful to have the luxury to try things and not worry about the bottom line.

How can you tell when your concerts are successful?

There are many different ways of measuring success, and it’s not always one of those things that you can define and quantify. Of course, if it’s a full house, you can call that a successful concert, but that’s clearly not the only measure. There’s just a certain magic that happens onstage when everything comes together. There’s a palpable communication between the performers and the audience and that certain je ne sais quoi and that flow of energy that you feel? I mean, you can also have a good review, and there are so many different things. But for me, it’s that moment of transcendence when everything comes together and the air molecules change. Something really special happens. I have to say that, in those particular moments, the performers kind of look at each other with that smile, and they just know that this is something extraordinary. The audience knows it. It’s the most beautiful thing.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

CORRECTION: December 5, 2014, 10:20 AM This post originally stated that the Four Seasons Centre overlooks Queen and Spadina, when it is actually located at the intersection of Queen and University. We regret the error.

Despite its new-on-the-scene status, the Inspire! Toronto International Book Fair is not messing around. On at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre from November 13 to 16, the fair is expecting between 30,000 and 50,000 visitors in 2014, its inaugural year. Some will be drawn in by the chance to meet big-name authors such as Margaret […]

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Photo courtesy of torontobookfair.ca

Despite its new-on-the-scene status, the Inspire! Toronto International Book Fair is not messing around. On at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre from November 13 to 16, the fair is expecting between 30,000 and 50,000 visitors in 2014, its inaugural year. Some will be drawn in by the chance to meet big-name authors such as Margaret Atwood and William Gibson. Others will be sitting in on workshops such as “Hip-Hop in the Classroom” and “How to Secure an Agent.” It goes without saying that nearly everyone will be shopping for books.

Nicola Dufficy is the one tasked with managing the frenetic schedule—she’s been the director of programming and operations at Inspire since January 2014. Previously, she spent a year overseeing the five Word on the Street festivals across Canada as the organization’s national festivals director; before that, she was the director of The Word on the Street Toronto for four years. “It’s incredibly exciting to be involved in an event in its inaugural year,” she says of her new role at Inspire, “and so my goal is to create a program and deliver operations where people will come to the event and feel like they’re at an event that’s much older than its first year.”

Dufficy, 32, has been in Toronto for nearly six years. “I fell in love! We came over thinking that we would be here for two years, and here I am, six years later.” Her hometown is Toowoomba, Australia, a “biggish” city of about 130,000 people. She holds a bachelor of Creative Arts from Griffith University and a Bachelor of Education from the University of Southern Queensland.

Our interview with Dufficy—about the power of Post-It notes, the role of self-publishing, and what it takes to wrangle an international author—is below.

Torontoist: Inspire is quite big, with seven stages, three days of programming, and multiple big names coming through. How did you know where to start?

Nicola Dufficy: I had my foundation working at The Word on the Street, and having insight into how to plan book events. The vision of the three executive directors at Inspire was really exciting to me when I accepted the position. So, looking at the foundation that they built with the stages that they wanted to run, my vision was to really go big with the programming. The way that I program is very strategic, so I want to actually draw people around the [venue of the] fair. I don’t just program stage by stage. I actually program the event as a whole. When we put the program together, we’re really looking at a balance of interests, a balance of readers, a balance of ages—everything! I’m very visual, and I put Post-It notes up on the wall so that I can see the whole program at one time, because I want to look across every hour to make sure there’s a mix of things that will interest people.

We have a whole bunch of workshops that are available, and we were really looking at targeting readers and writers. We also have workshops for teachers, librarians, schoolchildren, and a bunch of different writer’s workshops on offer. We really wanted to make it well-rounded: whether you’re interested in writing, whether you’re an established writer, you’re emerging or looking to self-publish, if you’re looking at it from the teaching angle or from an acquisition angle, there’s something for you at the event. We could have done the main program and that would have been enough for our first year, but having those workshops and catering to such a wide range of interests was a huge appeal.

Can you talk about the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit circle? It’s a different format from the rest of the stages, which seem very structured in their programming. This one seems a little looser.

We’re working with a group based out of B.C.—a First Nations publisher, a writer, and an artist—and they’ve helped contribute to and curate the programming. We’ve had a lot of phone conversations over the last few months about the vision for the circle, and it was really to create a platform that was different from the relationship an audience has when there’s a presenter on the stage and an audience in front of them. They really wanted the circle to be more dynamic and intimate and involve discussions between the presenter and the audience. We created a program that was a well-rounded look at what’s happening in First Nations, Métis, and Inuit literature across Canada. There are some writers who have a more traditional approach; we have children’s authors, we have spoken word artists and poets, political writers and playwrights. It’s a huge range of different perspectives, and it’s a really fantastic opportunity to celebrate and create a stage that’s a heartbeat to the fair. The working group was very much responsible for curating the program and coming up with which authors should be involved, and then we basically helped build the circle itself by organizing the travel and putting it together from there.

How did the self-publishing awards get started?

The Association for Art and Social Change, which is one of the producers of the book fair, has partnered with Blurb, the self-publishing company, to create an award that will really celebrate self-published authors. Blurb really feels like it’s an important platform to build because a lot of people are seeing self-publishing as a very exciting and validating option for them. The traditional publishing route has only so much scope when it comes to what they’re able to put out there, and a lot of it based on the profitability and marketability of the titles. And that makes sense, because it’s a business model. What Blurb was finding, and what I find really exciting, is that self-publishing can offer a platform for people who perhaps don’t want to sell thousands of copies of their books. They want to create a niche project that’s going to reach the people that they want it to reach. That goes from an artistic point of view, but they’re also contacted by not-for-profit groups who want to release a book that won’t work on a bookstore shelf, but still really needs to be out there and needs to be published.

What was your biggest coup? What are you most proud of getting out there?

To be able to bring in a big author for the event takes a concerted effort and sometimes many months of different types of proposals. For the big authors in our fair, we created targeted proposals and targeted pitches for the types of events that we’d like them to do. One of the authors I chased for many months was Jeff Kinney, the author of Diary of a Wimpy Kid. His [new] book comes out November 4, and I saw the opportunity to bring him to the event and have him do the Canadian launch of his book with us. The Friday of our event is a PD day in Toronto, so a lot of kids are going to be out of school and coming in with parents and grandparents, and we also have schools that are bussing kids in from outside of Toronto. There are so many children who are so excited about Jeff Kinney. I chased Jeff Kinney for four or five months, and I was so happy when we landed him.

It’s generally understood that print sales are dropping and that online retailers are taking over a larger share of the bookselling market. What role do you think book fairs have in selling books?

Two of Inspire’s executive directors launched a feasibility study into why Toronto didn’t have a book fair, and one of the things that came out of their talks with publishers is that what’s missing is the ability for customers and readers to discover new books. I haven’t seen a computer program that can intuitively tell me what I want to read next. Most people want to be able to browse with something tactile, or hear about something from word-of-mouth. The buzzword that we’ve been throwing around is “discoverability.” What our fair offers to readers is discoverability—being able to have a conversation face-to-face with the people who are producing these books, and to hear about new books, and to buy books for their families and friends, and discover their next read. Aside from being an amazing cultural event, it’s about being able to connect creators with readers, and to celebrate reading.

Has the fair faced any major hiccups or challenges?

Any major event is a huge challenge, and a first-year event is always going to be challenging, because you’re really trying to work out what the identity of the event is. All of our staff are very experienced and able to tackle those types of things, but I think in our first year the challenge is really creating that vision and then communicating it to people: who we are, what we want to achieve, what are our policies. It’s working out who we are operationally, so that we can have smooth operations for our publishers and visiting authors. It’s also introducing the world to who we are and what we stand for, and how they can get involved in the event.

Housing co-operatives in Toronto are a vast and varied landscape. No two co-ops are exactly alike—some are tucked away on shady side streets, while others are in apartment buildings. Some take up entire city blocks, while others take up single houses. Some accommodate students only, while others are exclusively for artists. Most, however, welcome everyone. […]

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Housing co-operatives in Toronto are a vast and varied landscape. No two co-ops are exactly alike—some are tucked away on shady side streets, while others are in apartment buildings. Some take up entire city blocks, while others take up single houses. Some accommodate students only, while others are exclusively for artists. Most, however, welcome everyone.

Tom Clement is the executive director of the Co-operative Housing Federation of Toronto. Serving 45,000 residents in 160 co-ops across the Greater Toronto Area, CHFT offers resources such as plain-language information packages, mediation during difficult board meetings, and assistance in getting new co-ops off the ground. “We have a framework to help them be better,” he explains. Clement, 66, has been in the role since 1993, and with CHFT since 1981: “Most of my working career has been in non-profits or working with volunteer boards.”

Our interview—about community involvement, mixing the personal and the political, and the importance of democracy—follows.

Torontoist: For people unfamiliar with co-op housing, can you tell me what co-ops are and why someone might want to live in one?

Tom Clement: Co-ops are non-profit housing. Each co-operative is a separate corporation, and they have a volunteer board. They usually hire staff to manage the co-op. It’s a great opportunity for people to get involved in learning about governance and the democratic structure. They’re mixed income, so it’s a real opportunity for people to live together and, I always think, to learn new skills. I find that people who go through a co-op experience, it really does have an effect on their life.

How does co-op housing affect the broader housing landscape in Toronto?

Well, we’re all over the place in Toronto. I think what we do differently is involvement, not in the housing co-op, but in the greater community. People will be involved in the neighbourhood associations, and parents will be involved in the schools. It may sound like a small thing, but co-ops beautify their properties. Other forms of non-profit housing don’t really engage the residents in this. It gets pride of ownership.

How would that be different from something like a condo structure, where people own their units but the condo is responsible for the beautification process?

That opportunity isn’t available to people who live in condos, and it’s just another level they’re not engaged at. Whatever form of housing people are in, I think if they’re engaged, it makes for a better situation and better neighbours. Homeowners are engaged in their neighbourhood and take pride in their neighbourhood. If there’s not that opportunity, there’s not that sense of neighbourhood. Because we’re mixed-income and families, people often don’t understand that there are real opportunities for families being raised in co-ops. There are things that we used to talk about in other times about the community, and they’re happening in housing co-ops. If you have kids, there are other kids for them to play with. I’m sure it happens in other areas, but this is an opportunity for kids to have other kids around them. We need more ways to get families into the city.

A lot of people know Olivia Chow and Jack Layton lived in a housing co-op, and Chow’s political opponents often cite this as a knock against her. What’s your response to that?

As far as I know, and I know quite a bit about it because I was around, Olivia and Jack paid what we called market rent. They weren’t getting a subsidy, and they even paid a little bit extra, which they didn’t have to do. They lived in the co-op, and Olivia’s mother also lived in the co-op, and they became an extended family. Really, what this is all about is politicizing someone’s personal life. People have a right to privacy, and there’s too much politicization of people’s personal lives. There’s been a lot of that in the last couple years in Toronto. We need to judge people on how they govern in whatever position they’re in.

How do you think the upcoming election is affecting the conversation about housing and co-ops in Toronto?

John Tory and Olivia Chow have both mentioned the issue of ensuring that, at the end of the co-op’s operating agreements, that low-income people would be able to stay. John Tory didn’t do it first, but he’s made it clear that he was in support of the co-ops. Other issues have taken over the election. It seems to be be the long election of my entire life—it’s like watching the movie Titanic in slow-motion.

Basically, the way co-ops work is that some people pay what we call market rent, but because co-ops are non-profit, the rent falls below the market rates. Then another group of people who aren’t in a position to pay that rent get a rent geared to income. The rent geared to income money comes from the federal government. At the end of the operating agreement, what we want the federal government to do is to continue to support those low-income people who can’t pay the market rent. We couldn’t project what things would be like in 35 years. It was a number that was just too big for us to imagine. We’re not asking anybody to give us millions of dollars to fix up the buildings. We’re going to take care of the buildings. But we need to protect those low-income members, and that’s what all levels of government need to come to the table to do. It’s perfectly reasonable.

People work their whole lives, and often they don’t have great jobs, and they hope in their retirement that maybe they could get some assistance to pay their rent. Young people who have their future in front of them, it would be great if we could help them live in housing as they go to school and get started. Co-ops have been great for young families. That option may not exist if we can’t help low-income people, and while the kids are young, sometimes the family can’t afford the full rent. Providing people with safe affordable housing is a must wherever you are.

Co-ops attract many different characters and personality types. Any stories you want to share?

I’ve always said that, when I’m on my deathbed, people who want to hear some great stories about co-ops should come! I can reveal all. [Laughs] No, so many great things happen in co-ops. The interesting thing is that we ask people to make difficult decisions. For example, members can get together and say the board is doing a bad job. They can requisition a meeting, and the members can vote on whether or not to remove the board. I’ve chaired many of those meetings over the years, and I’ve watched how carefully the members act. People can be really mad, but then they’re also really weighing their decision of should these people be removed. That’s democratic. Just because you get elected for a couple years, there’s still the possibility that you can be removed if you don’t do your job. Not just by a few people, but by the majority of the members. To me, that speaks of democracy. I ask where else would you see a democratic situation like that?

CORRECTION: October 17, 2014, 8:15 PM This post originally quoted Tom Clement as saying that John Tory was the first to mention the issue of low-income people being able to stay in a co-ops after the end of the co-op’s operating agreement. In fact, he noted that John Tory was not the first to raise the issue—Olivia Chow had already done so.

Most magazines written for teen girls would never start a fashion article with the sentence “I’ve been fat and hairy my whole life,” but Shameless isn’t trying to be like most teen magazines. What started as a journalism project 10 years ago has transformed into an independent magazine for, and often by, the kind of […]

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Most magazines written for teen girls would never start a fashion article with the sentence “I’ve been fat and hairy my whole life,” but Shameless isn’t trying to be like most teen magazines. What started as a journalism project 10 years ago has transformed into an independent magazine for, and often by, the kind of young women who don’t often see themselves in the pages of mass-marketed magazines: people of colour, of disability, of non-binary gender representation, and more.

Julia Horel began as a Shameless blogger several years ago, and after stints as the magazine’s web director and blog editor, has been in the publisher’s seat since February 2014. Originally from Saskatoon, Horel came to Toronto six years ago after earning a Masters in Publishing from Simon Fraser University. She’s now the general manager of a book publishing distribution collective, and her knowledge of accounting, distribution, and the Canadian book and magazine landscape dovetails neatly with Shameless‘s needs. Like everyone involved with Shameless, Horel is a volunteer, but “I’m the business leader of Shameless, so my goals are more about the organization. The main goal is to make the magazine sustainable enough that we can afford to pay our staff and contributors.” Shameless is now in its 10th year of publication, a milestone it’ll be celebrating later this year with a gala fundraiser.

Our interview with Horel—about feminism on the internet, the challenges of working solely with volunteers, and the power of a good proof-reading session—is below.

Torontoist: What exactly does an independent magazine publisher do?

Julia Horel: Shameless is a bit unique, partly in that it’s completely volunteer-run. We publish only three times a year, so our cycle is a bit longer than magazines that publish monthly or every other month. Some of the things I do include taking care of all the financials, like paying the bills. I manage the team that handles circulation and advertising, and the team that handles events. We have launch parties for every issue and a gala fundraiser every year, so I oversee the team members whose roles are to organize those things. Shameless is also a non-profit, so some of our mandate is about serving teen girls and trans youth specifically, and the social justice community in Toronto and Canada more broadly, so we also have tables at events, we try to have a presence at things like Word on the Street and more specific social justice activism space like the Toronto Queer Zine Fair.

We are maybe less focused on money, which sounds kind of funny, but at the moment we’re just trying to get enough money to keep the magazine going. Most magazines have funding, but we don’t. We don’t have any grants; part of my job is to explore possibilities of grants that we might be eligible for, but it’s actually really hard to get grants as a magazine in Canada. There are a lot of criteria for the major granting bodies, our circulation is too low, and we just don’t qualify. There aren’t a lot of emerging-magazine grants, and to qualify for a lot of those grants, we have to pay our contributors … but we can’t pay our contributors because we don’t have any money. It’s kind of a chicken and egg situation. It’s hard to get ongoing operational grants, and the grants that we can get are often project-based, so we have to come up with extra things to do to get money to supplement what you’re already doing—but then you have to do those things, too! [Laughs]

How did Shameless’s mandate become to speak with and about young women and trans youth? It seems like such a clear response to mainstream teen media.

You’re absolutely right. The magazine was founded in 2004 by two journalism students, Nicole Cohen and Melinda Mattos. They’re both still involved in the magazine and sit on the board now, and they founded it as a journalism project for school and then decided to carry on with it after they graduated. It was a direct response to their feeling that there were no magazines that spoke to young people that didn’t just talk about how to wear your hair and attract boys. Our mandate has evolved over the years to become much more explicitly trans-inclusive. That’s been really important to us. The makeup of the collective has changed, and we’re much more focused now on being really intersectional in terms of race, class, gender, identity, disability and those kinds of things. We want to be speaking to teens who don’t get to see themselves in mainstream media.

The magazine was founded for young women. The founders, as they were conceiving of the magazine, were using an inclusive definition of the word “woman,” so they were absolutely considering trans women to be women. Over the years, as more people have joined the collective who are more politically aware, who have worked in and are part of various communities, and they’ve brought their influence into the magazine. It’s really important for us to speak to all youth who aren’t seen in mainstream media, and that includes youth who are gender nonconforming, and youth who are trans, or transitioning, or youth whose gender presentation doesn’t fit the mainstream. It’s just as important for us to include youth of colour or disability. It’s something that we’re constantly working on.

How do you go about producing feminist content for a younger crowd? What changes and what stays the same?

Our style assumes that teen readers and youth are intelligent and are just as curious and eager to learn as adults. We write and produce material that is accessible—that is, someone who is new to it can easily jump in and understand—but that doesn’t talk down. It’s not necessarily a 101, and we hope that no matter where people are on the feminism spectrum, they can jump in. It’s part of the reason we had, and hope to have again, a youth advisory board. It can be hard because none of our team are in their teens, and we try to remember that teens are just as smart as adults, and they care about the same things. We also include teen voices, like our “Talking Back” column, which is always in the magazine and which is always written by teens, and a lot of our web content is now being written by youth.

The feminist presence in the media seem to have expanded since Shameless was first launched, and there are now a lot of different voices: Jezebel, The Hairpin, The Toast. How have you seen feminist media change in the last decade?

I think it’s changed a lot. We have to thank or blame the internet—probably thank—because it does have a way of democratizing media a little bit. But just because there’s a platform for voices doesn’t mean they’re the ones who are getting heard. Way more people have heard of Jezebel, for instance, than have heard of Racialicious, which is an incredible site by and for people of colour. It’s changed, and it’s great that there are more women, but it’s the same voices that are still being amplified the loudest. It’s still often a particular type of voice and woman: white, American, middle-class women, and people who can afford to write for free, which is limiting. There need to be more women of colour, more trans folks, more people with disabilities.

How do you manage an all-volunteer team?

It’s hard, because the type of people who volunteer to write for a feminist magazine are also the type of people who are really busy doing a lot of different things that they’re really passionate about. This isn’t anyone’s only thing. The biggest problem is time management, but everyone who’s doing this is there because they really believe in the project, and they love the community and the work. We can offer people a title and some training, but people aren’t working at Shameless because of mercenary reasons. The best part is working with the team and learning from everybody. Even the conversations we have about semantics during proof-reading sessions teach me something. We lean incredibly heavily on Sheila Sampath, who is both our editorial and art director and many other things. She manages just about every aspect of the magazine except the business side. We set deadlines way in advance, and we start to plan the next issue before the next one is put to bed, and that helps a lot. But really, it’s a lot of follow-up and a lot of commitment from people on the team. If someone is going to leave, they usually finish up the current issue, and we can get someone to shadow them and take on the next issue. That helps a lot.

Names like Wizard Wolf, Bounty Hunter, and Cat Lady make Bellwoods Brewery beers difficult to ignore—and so, too, do their cheeky and clean-lined labels: it’s easy to see why the bottle shop regularly sells out and the brewery’s patio is perpetually busy. The labels are courtesy of Matt and Andrew McCracken, 33-year-old twin brothers who […]

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Matt (L) and Andrew (R) McCracken.

Names like Wizard Wolf, Bounty Hunter, and Cat Lady make Bellwoods Brewery beers difficult to ignore—and so, too, do their cheeky and clean-lined labels: it’s easy to see why the bottle shop regularly sells out and the brewery’s patio is perpetually busy. The labels are courtesy of Matt and Andrew McCracken, 33-year-old twin brothers who run Ossington-based Doublenaut Studios. Matt works as a full-time graphic designer, while Andrew splits his time between the studio and Town Moto, which he co-owns. Both are trained graphic designers (Andrew graduated from Humber College, while Matt attended Algonquin) who launched Doublenaut Studios 10 years ago after moving to Toronto from Ottawa. They’ve done concert posters for City and Colour and The National, logos for local businesses like North Standard, and, for the last eighteen months, labels for Bellwoods Brewery.

Our interview—about Bellwoods’ new location, why some labels make for lousy T-shirts, and the perks of designing for a brewery—is below.

Torontoist: How did the collaboration between Doublenaut Studios and Bellwoods Brewery begin?

Andrew McCracken: We met them in the neighbourhood, but they didn’t necessarily know what we did. They knew me as the guy with the motorcycle gear shop and weren’t familiar with our design work. They were interested in doing labels for all their different beers, but they didn’t really know where to start. Patrick [Ridley, Bellwoods’ brewer and operations manager] was doing some stuff for them, but I got the impression that they were looking for someone, and a few mutual friends knew that we did design work and poster art. So our friends pitched us to them, and then we had a meeting with the two owners and took it from there. It made sense, because they’re so close that we can just walk over any time we have a question, and they pop in here all the time. It’s a pretty easy working relationship.

Matt McCracken: I don’t think they were that familiar with our design work before they met us, but we showed them some things. I gave them some of our beer print posters, and they looked at our website. We do branding as well, and we were looking at this as more of a branding job. But they were looking at it more like the work we do on our concert posters: they wanted each label to be very different, and not to have a common theme to run through them all. Initially, we had to figure that out. We thought they wanted one thing, but they wanted something else.

These labels are also produced as T-shirt and posters—how does that inform the design process?

Matt: We start with the label, and go with imagery that works on a small scale. The labels are roughly three inches wide, so it has to be easy to tell what’s going on and not be too busy. We like to do simple, direct design. The goal is to sell in the LCBO, and they wanted to be able to stand off the shelves there, as well. That plan hasn’t really happened yet because they’ve been so busy and so popular that they can’t make enough to sell to the LCBO, but that might change when they open the new location. We try to create something that’s visually appealing and that someone would want to buy. We start with the label and try to make it appealing. If they think the image will work well as as a poster or shirt, and they get people asking about it, they’ll print it. For posters, it’s just a matter of scaling it up. Shirts are a little more difficult, because you have to think about which colours work well together and other considerations. You can get away with more things on paper.

How collaborative is your relationship? Do you get to taste a beer before you design its label, and does that play into your design process?

Matt: When they have a new beer that they need a label for, it’s usually not bottled yet. Normally, we haven’t tasted it, but they will give us a breakdown and description of the beer. If they have ideas based around the beer, they’ll give us some notes. For example, a dark stout might get a label that’s a little bit evil. A lot of their names are plays on music or metal bands, so sometimes the names give imagery right away. With their beer Gotham, they wanted a dark ominous city. So sometimes they have specific ideas of what they want, and other times they just want us to run with it.

We start with a sketch of an idea that we think will work and show it to them. If they like it, we’ll go ahead and do the label, and if they’re not sure about it, we’ll go with something else. The goal is to make them fun and cool, and a beer that people want to drink.

What is like working with a brewery as a client?

Matt: With clients, it kind of depends. It’s nice, because these days, we’re kind of established and people have seen our work. People are starting to come to us because they like our style. They’ll give us some direction and explain the project, and then some clients give us free rein to do what we want. Other clients have a more specific idea, and they want us to work with their idea. We can do it either way. The Bellwoods labels are pretty much left up to us, and they’ve been a great client in that respect. It was a little rocky to start. We nailed the first couple that we did for them, and everyone was happy. Then we tried different approaches with some labels, and they didn’t necessarily like them. We had never worked with them before, and we tried a lot of different things that weren’t right and that got rejected. Now, though, we just kind of know what they like and don’t like. It’s better to make the client happy.

Andrew: We have a friendly handshake agreement with them, and we get paid for each label. We also have an agreement that we won’t do labels for other breweries, because they want to have that look for themselves. We like working with them a lot, and we do as many labels for them as we want to do, basically.

Matt: We design an average of two labels a month, and sometimes more. They’re always releasing new beers! We’ve been approached by a couple of different breweries who want us to do for them what we’re doing for Bellwoods. And we get also get lots of free beers and samples, on top of getting paid for the work.

What would be your dream beer/design project?

Andrew: It’s hard to say, because in a lot of ways, this is kind of already it. It’s so relaxed and very free creatively. For us, it’s great having this the way it is. As far as being designers, you always want to work for big companies, and be doing redesigns of well-established brands, but I don’t know if that’s us. Doing something like that would be fun, but this is more our style.

Matt: They’re definitely one of our favourite clients, and this has turned into a really great job. We’ve gotten a lot of recognition, and everyone seems to enjoy the labels. We love seeing everyone posting pictures of the bottles on Instagram. We’ve talked with them a little bit about doing some artwork for their new space up on Dupont, maybe somethings based on the labels but on a bigger scale. It’s the same kind of work but it could be a lot of fun.

The Bonnie Gordon College of Confectionary Arts is an unexpectedly sweet wonderland hidden away on an industrial stretch of Caledonia Road. Inside, the smell of fresh baked goods permeates the air, and the school’s gleaming kitchens welcome everyone from weekend workshoppers to dedicated students working toward a diploma. The hallways are lined with glowing profiles […]

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Photo courtesy of the Bonnie Gordon College of Confectionary Arts.

The Bonnie Gordon College of Confectionary Arts is an unexpectedly sweet wonderland hidden away on an industrial stretch of Caledonia Road. Inside, the smell of fresh baked goods permeates the air, and the school’s gleaming kitchens welcome everyone from weekend workshoppers to dedicated students working toward a diploma. The hallways are lined with glowing profiles of former students, orchids made of fondant, and dollhouses that turn out to be cakes.

This is Michael Smith’s domain. As the school’s head of baking instruction, he works full time teaching a rotating roster of a dozen classes. Smith, 28, has lived in Toronto since 2008. After training at the Cordon Bleu in Ottawa, and following a two-year stint at the Summerhill Market, Smith gradually transitioned from the kitchen to the classroom. He is now responsible for developing and teaching the school’s baking curriculum. “I want to bring more of a baking focus to the school. Our decorating program is really comprehensive and there’s a lot to it, but there’s room for expansion in the baking program,” he says, sitting across from me in chef’s whites that are still pristine after a six-hour class.

Torontoist: How do you go from being a full-time baker to teaching other people how to bake?

Michael Smith: Teaching was never something I had thought of doing. I just kind of fell into it. A friends of mine is also an instructor [at the Bonnie Gordon College], and she mentioned that they were looking for baking instructors. At the time, we didn’t do nearly as much baking at the college as we do now. It was in its baby stage, and they brought me in because they wanted to expand on it. I had a crippling fear of public speaking, so part of me wanted to try teaching out and see if that would help—“do something that scares you,” essentially. At the beginning, I found it difficult to vocalize my knowledge of baking. Eventually, it became easier, and I would think of it as if I were training an employee. I was used to doing that at a pastry shop or a bakery, and I found teaching similar to that.

A typical class is usually a full day, and it’s pretty intensive. It’s a lot of back and forth: I’ll demo, they’ll make the product, and then I’ll demo again. It’s quite a lengthy process to build a class and plan it out. There’s a recipe development stage first, so after what we decide we’re going to make, we develop the recipes. We make sure that they’re doable within the class’s timeframe. With bread, it’s especially tricky, because breads take so long. We test the recipes, and after we’ve got those nailed down, we make the handouts and make sure we have the supplies, and then we write out a checklist of how the day is going to run. We estimate as best we can, and then after the first class, we go back to the drawing board to see what worked and what we need to rearrange. I love recipe development part of it, but I also like writing handouts and putting the class together and seeing what works. Over time, I’ve gotten a lot better at it.

Who are your typical students?

Our programs are open to anyone. If you’re coming in with absolutely no knowledge whatsoever, that’s okay, but you might find it a little difficult and there might be a bit of a learning curve. For our diplomas, it can be quite varied, but generally it’s younger people looking to get into the industry. With the continuing education classes, it can be young people, older people, or in between. You might get mothers and daughters or husbands and wives, and it’s a really diverse crowd.

I find a lot of people will go through a career change later in life, and they might be sick of their office jobs. They’re getting into the kitchen because it’s so different and it’s so interesting to them. I know when I went to school, you would get all ages, from all over the world. It was really neat.

Before you became a baker, you were interested in studying architecture. Does that have an impact on what you do now?

All through high school, that’s what I was geared towards. I chose classes in drafting, physics, calculus, and arts, which were all the requirements for architecture. You know how some people know what they want to do right away? That was me. I wanted to go into architecture, but I had always loved cooking and baking at the same time. To be honest, I don’t really know what changed my mind, but towards the end of high school, I decided to abandon the whole architecture thing and go into culinary school. So that’s what I did. Even sometimes when you’re building cakes, aspects of architecture come into it. They kind of go hand in hand. In the longer program, we teach sculpted cakes and how to build cakes. We used to do standing figure cakes, and there’s a lot of engineering that goes into that.

From your spot in the crossroads of baking’s long history, and the college’s trend-driven work, what are some food trends that might be coming our way?

I feel like people are coming back to homespun, older-style pastries and doing them in a way that’s a bit more modern. Sometimes when you take stuff that was popular in the 1800s, it’s a good idea, but it doesn’t translate into modern tastes. For instance, we have a carnival confections class, which takes things like lollipops and candy apples and reinvents them to make them a little bit more interesting. Using different ingredients and new, more exotic flavours, and different ways to decorate.

We’ve been excited by the trend for eclairs. Eclairs, especially in Europe, have always been popular, but over here’s it’s just been the standard chocolate. We wanted to show that there are a bunch of possibilities for decorating and flavouring that people would have never thought of for an eclair. We’re doing a tangerine eclair that’s a really vibrant, fresh pastry cream that’s going into it. I really like it.

What’s your opinion of Pinterest and Instagram, where there are a lot of hashtag foodies?

Personally, I’m not one to follow trends, but social media is a really great way to get pastry out there. So many more people are interested in this art form, which I think is a great way to keep it alive, fresh, and updated. I’ll get people coming into my classes who have seen these trendy things and want to know how to do them, and I love talking to students about taking what we’ve learned and translating them into what they’ve seen.

What do you think of the current interest in low-carb, no-carb, grain-free diets that are so popular these days?

[Laughs] I’ll be honest, I’ve sometimes stuck to diets like that! I tend to eat more or less low-carb, and I don’t eat a lost of pastries or bread, even though I love it. If I am going to eat it, I want to make sure it’s really good quality.

The one fad that concerns me is the gluten-free trend. Obviously some people absolutely have to avoid gluten, but I feel like a lot of people are jumping on the bandwagon. What I don’t love is that gluten-free seems healthier to people, when that’s not necessarily the case. When low-carb or gluten-free is seen as the healthiest option, that’s what worries me. With gluten-free baking, it’s so big that we have to offer a class. People want to learn about it. It is very different. For me, it kind of gets scientific, because we’re using these different ingredients and different methods, and I do like that part of it. I do love figuring out how to take a product that I’m used to and make it gluten-free without sacrificing taste and texture, and coming at it from that analytical and experimental mindset.

At the age of 24, Robyn Yates Cameron already knows more about the history of Toronto than most of us will learn in our entire lives. As chief historian and researcher at Urban Capers (“My business card actually says ‘Historian and Sleuth'”), she puts her knowledge to good use by designing scavenger hunts that challenge […]

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At the age of 24, Robyn Yates Cameron already knows more about the history of Toronto than most of us will learn in our entire lives. As chief historian and researcher at Urban Capers (“My business card actually says ‘Historian and Sleuth'”), she puts her knowledge to good use by designing scavenger hunts that challenge competitors to solve 18 to 25 riddles about Toronto’s landmarks, memorials, buildings, and parks. Current tours venture across Kensington Market and through the Royal Ontario Museum; Urban Capers is also developing tours of Leslieville, the Distillery District, and the St. Lawrence Market.

Cameron, who grew up in Mississauga, has been with Urban Capers for almost a year since finishing her master’s degree in Canadian history at the University of Toronto. “This is my first real-person job,” she says, a bit sheepishly. She’s looking forward to getting her PhD at some point, as “Urban Capers is a growing business and I’m not sure where I’m going to fit in in the future, but there will always be a need for a historian.”

Our interview with Cameron—about how Canada became a country, history in a city constantly under construction, and the toughest clowns in history—is below.

Torontoist: How did you find the chief historian job with a scavenger hunt organization?

Robyn Yates Cameron: I was working on my master’s at U of T. I’m actually an expert on historical Chinatowns in Toronto. My thesis topic was on Chinese-Canadian gambling in Toronto in the 1920s to 1940s. Jodi Sinden, who runs Urban Capers, had one or two scavenger hunts already built, but she was looking to do one in Chinatown. She put up an ad on the U of T website looking for students to help out part-time, and I answered. She didn’t hire me at first, but a few months later I got a phone call asking if I wanted to work with her.

I worked part time as we started to build the Chinatown hunt, and then I spent the summer studying in Japan. When I came back, I told Jodi I was looking for a full-time job, and she decided to take a big leap and hire me as the first full-time employee. Scavenger hunts combine my two loves: talking to people and leading on tours, and telling them why I love history so much—and also doing the research part, because a lot of it is putting together a booklet that we give to people who then go free-range on the hunt.

How do you build a scavenger hunt?

It starts by picking a historically significant neighbourhood or museum that we want to work in. My baby is Chinatown and Kensington, and we wanted to make a food tour. So much of the area has to do with immigration and multiculturalism, and a really good way to express that is through food. The first step is usually online, where we pick up the background story of the place. I write a historical background, and I pick out some of the main buildings that we want to talk about, or big pieces of art. The second step is going out and asking what speaks to us in that neighbourhood—what it is about this building or piece of art that people will be interested in? Then we spend about a month going out and looking at things. We’re staring at them, wondering how we could make it into a question.

For example, on the U of T campus there’s a memorial to the students who died fighting off an Irish invasion. Back in the 1860s, the Fenian Brotherhood was trying to promote Irish nationalism, and they thought a good way to do that was to put pressure on the British in Canada by attacking overland from the United States. One of the reasons that Canada became a country is that the provinces banded together to fight off an Irish invasion. Our question asks which hand these brave soldiers would be able to lend you, because both of the soldiers on the memorial statue are missing one of their hands. You have to figure out what the question is asking you, and then write down right or left. The questions all have an introductory part about why it’s significant and why we’re leading you to this place, and then we get people to engage with it and solve a riddle about it.

How do you identify neighbourhoods that have enough history to carry the weight of a scavenger hunt?

So far, we’ve been picking really obvious ones. The ROM is a pretty obvious place to start, for instance. Two tours are around the U of T campus area, where there’s such a high density of older buildings and memorials around that area that we have hundreds of extra questions that we’re not using. As we move further away from the obvious ones, it will be about what interests us and what themes we want to explore. We’ve had a bunch of requests to do Regent Park, which is around our office. Regent Park has such a story of change and neighbourhood revitalization, so we’ll have to talk about layers of people and experiences in that. We pick old buildings, new buildings—it’s easier with old buildings, because they tend to have more things for people to look at, and people don’t know their stories as well. For one of our tours, we branched out into Yorkville, and a lot of the hippie counterculture stuff that used to be there is just totally gone.

You’ve taken neighbourhoods that we think of as being quite narrow in their historical scope—here I’m thinking of the queer elements of the Church-Wellesley neighbourhood—and included sports and entertainment histories. You’ve also taken an area such as Kensington and really focused on the culinary aspects of its history. How do you handle building tours in a city that has so many narrative threads?

That’s a negotiation process every time we do a new hunt. With Church Street, we really wanted it to be all LGBTQ history, but there are so few physical remains of that. A lot of it has been obliterated, and the newer things are sometimes too stark to draw a question from. Also, that’s not the only part of the Church/Wellesley experience. When Maple Leaf Gardens is on the street, you can’t really pass that by on a historical tour. We also talk about the Allan Gardens, which has a couple different connections to the LGBTQ history. Oscar Wilde gave a speech there, and it used to be a very popular gay cruising spot. But it’s also been used for other things: we talk about the monuments that are in the park, and the murals that were done by First Nations artists. With Kensington, we really wanted to have a food tour, because that’s fun. Some of the questions are about Chinese good-luck rituals or textile workers unions, but you also need to eat at a bunch of restaurants.

What’s your favourite bit of Toronto history that you’ve discovered so far?

My all-time favourite is the Circus Riot, which took place in 1855 on Front Street close to the Distillery District. There was a big circus in one week, and at night time, the clowns decided to go to a local brothel. They were drinking, and they were going to visit some of the ladies of the night, but they skipped the line ahead of a group of firefighters. The firefighters didn’t take well to these clowns skipping the line, and they started a fight. The clowns beat them up so badly that they put two of the firefighters in the hospital. These were like rodeo clowns, not children’s party clowns. So, the next day, the firefighters burned down the circus. The police chief and a bunch of other firefighters just showed up and watched. The circus tried to pack up what they could and just fled into the countryside. The police chief was later investigated for letting a bank robbery suspect go, and he lost his job over that.

Toronto’s Pride celebrations are undeniably a big deal, and this year, WorldPride is upping the ante considerably. Event organizers estimate the 10-day festival will contribute more than a quarter of a billion dollars to the city’s economy and bring millions of visitors to Toronto. As executive director of Pride Toronto, Kevin Beaulieu is the man […]

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Toronto’s Pride celebrations are undeniably a big deal, and this year, WorldPride is upping the ante considerably. Event organizers estimate the 10-day festival will contribute more than a quarter of a billion dollars to the city’s economy and bring millions of visitors to Toronto. As executive director of Pride Toronto, Kevin Beaulieu is the man tasked with overseeing it all.

Beaulieu has been on the job since 2011, following an eight-year stint at City Hall (which included a year spent working for Kristyn Wong-Tam, the councillor whose ward hosts the majority of the Pride events) and plenty of queer community group involvement at the University of Toronto and elsewhere. He grew up in Simcoe, but Beaulieu, 43, has lived in Toronto for 25 years. “The late 1980s were a difficult time for LGBT people in small towns,” he says when asked what drew him to Toronto. “There’s a diversity of people here.”

His favourite part of the job? “The volunteers here are so passionate about what they do. I know other organizations struggle to find volunteers as committed and dedicated as the ones I get work with. They don’t ask for anything in return. They just love being part of the celebration.”

Our interview with Beaulieu—about programming for the LGBT community and celebrations with a purpose—is below.

Torontoist: So what exactly sets WorldPride apart from the homegrown Toronto Pride that we all know and love?

Kevin Beaulieu: It is built on a successful Pride that’s taken generations to build. The result is the work of many people. There will still be a parade, but it’ll be an enhanced parade—it will be longer, much bigger, and with an international scope and scale to it, which will be true of the whole festival. There will be a Parade of Nations in there, and some additional performance elements. There will be an opening ceremony happening in Nathan Phillips Square [it occurred on June 20], where Gilbert Baker is going to raise the rainbow flag for us. He’s the creator of the flag, so it’s going be an amazing event. We’ll have a closing ceremony, which hasn’t been done before, where we’ll hand off WorldPride to the next host city, Madrid, which hosts in 2017.

Very importantly for WorldPride, human rights is at the centre of what we do. We celebrate, but it’s a celebration with a purpose. We will have about 400 people at the WorldPride Human Rights conference, including about 150 presenters, thinkers, activists, and artists from over 50 countries, for a dialogue about human rights in our communities worldwide. That’s central to what WorldPride is. We can take for granted here that it’s a celebration, and that nearly the whole city comes out to celebrate with us, but that’s not the case everywhere. It’s really important that we have an understanding of what’s happening around the world.

The final thing that makes it different this year is that we’ve extended partnerships with other organizations. There are galleries, museums, theatres, festivals—Luminato, TIFF and InsideOut, the AGO, Buddies in Bad Times, The Gardiner Museum. There are 17 of them, and between them they’ve put together 560 days worth of programming over the course of Pride. We asked them to step up and program for the LGBT communities, and they did that in a big way.

Toronto’s Pride is one of the biggest in the world, with tons of programming and festivals and celebrations for people of every age, background, sobriety level, and level of mobility. What are some of the biggest checkmarks on your to-do list when you’re putting this all together?

We exist to serve the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, questioning, intersex, two-spirit, and allies community. It’s right in our founding documents. That’s first and foremost. There are high expectations of a broad array of programming that reflects and serves all those communities. There are people who focus on the numbers, but I’m focused on the quality of the event and how people feel when they come away from it.

People know that we bring in over a million participants each year, and it’s expected to be more this year. There’s a practical checklist: we need 2,000 volunteers, and it’s easy to quantify that in terms of signatures on volunteer agreements. It’s not so easy to quantify the real contribution that they make, which is immense. There are details like the number of barricades that you need on the street, and the number of public toilets, and the fact that we build seven or eight of our stages in a day and then take them down overnight. We have fundraising goals—this year, it’s twice what we would aim for a in a regular year, partly because we’ve saved some money and partly because our partners at the city and provincial level have stepped up. You build your checklist out of having the practical experience of having produced the festival in the past. We know what we need to do, mechanically, to make it happen.

There has been controversy in the past few years about how the Trans March fits into the Pride landscape. Vicecovered the issue in 2013, and trans activists have been vocal about feeling left out and underrepresented. How is the Pride event looking to change that this year?

The way the Pride is organized is that volunteer teams take on a certain aspect of the festival. There’s a team for the Dyke March, there’s a team for the Trans March, one for Family Pride—the list goes on. We have a Trans Pride team that works very hard not only to produce the mechanics of the event, but also to connect with the community. I think we could certainly do a much better job of that. But, you know, that’s an ongoing dialogue. It’s important to us that the trans community is part of who we serve. It’s not always easy. One of the challenges in an organization like Pride is that there’s such a broad diversity—is serving everyone. Everyone has an idea of what Pride should be, and all of those people are right, and it’s not always easy to reconcile all of those differing ideas, especially when sometimes they come into conflict. All we can do is continue the dialogue in good faith.

Our North Stage is focused largely on trans performances, for and by trans community members. That’s also where the Trans Pride March will happen on Friday June 27. That will take place on Yonge Street. It’s the longest route we’ve ever had for a Trans March, and it will end at Toronto’s main central square with performances by local band Crackpuppy, and the headliner of that show will be Against Me!, which has a huge following around the world. We don’t put the trans programming only in the trans spaces. It’s important to us that it’s infused throughout the festival as well.

What’s one thing you wish you could change about Pride?

It is a 10-day festival, and this year I think we’ve done a really good job of filling out that 10 days. It’s something we’ve always done in name, but it really gets kind of thin towards the middle. But everybody knows about the big weekend, and everybody rushes downtown for the parade and the marches and the street festival. I wouldn’t change that, but I would add to it. Spread it not just over the 10 days, but across the city more, so that it isn’t a matter of having everyone in one place at one time, but that people are feeling pride in their own neighbourhoods. They’re still going to come downtown, but if we can use that 10-day period to make people feel pride, maybe at a smaller scale, in their own communities and in their local pubs or dance clubs or community centre. WorldPride is starting to help us go down that path, but I’d like to see that enhanced and continued.